Carmen Maki & Blues Creation - Carmen Maki Blues Creation (1971)

Reissue of rare as hell 1971 heavy rock guitar monster from Japan with the beautiful Carmen Maki doing her best Grace Slick impression. Don't go thinking that "Demon and Eleven Children" is the only heavy album from these guys! This is every bit just as essential. I swear, this thing has some brutal non-stop wailing guitar! It also has some sweet mellow bluesy psychedelic rock numbers too, but it's all top notch. - Freak Emporium

Third album by this great band featuring the Japanese hard psych blues rockers backing a talented female lead singer. This fusion works well with plenty of fluid lead guitar winding around the delicate yet powerful vocals of Ms. Maki. - PandorasBox

With a career that spans the mid-60s right up to the present day, Carmen Maki is something of a fixture in Japanese music, though her music will be too mainstream for the majority of Japrock fans. She began as a fairly typical chanteuse before joining Shuji Terayama’s Tenjosajiki theatre company in 1968, during which time she was briefly involved with J. A. Caesar. Thereafter, Maki sung with Kazuo Takeda’s Blues Creation, releasing the imaginatively-titled LP CARMEN MAKI & BLUES CREATION. Unfortunately, while the record did much for Maki’s career, her fairly standard sub-Janis, sub-Maggie Bell blues holler undermined the otherwise brilliant Blues Creation and set them on the road to average releases. Maki formed the more progressively styled Oz, whose 1975 debut CARMEN MAKI & OZ was obviously a punt at commercial success, after which time her career became of little further interest as LPs such as TOZASRETA MATI (1976), III (1977), LAST LIVE (19776) and NIGHTSTALKER (1979) ploughed obvious hard rock and soft muso folk realms.